Some actors study their way into a role. Danny Gardner just went home, so to speak.
Long before he strapped on the flaming candlesticks eight times a week, he was the kid who wore the “Be Our Guest” cassette down to static, reciting a maître d’s patter in a living room decades before a stage ever asked him to.
Watching him now, on a Broadway stage, it’s no wonder you get the sense Lumière was never a part he landed. It was a part of a legacy he had long imagined.
Moreover, with his wife and toddler also in the production, there was perhaps never a role so meant for an actor to “feel so much at home.”
The Disney star plays the candlestick-handed Lumière in the Disney Classic “Beauty and the Beast,” which opens Sept. 22 at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa.
Beauty and the Beast, directed & choreographed by Matt West, features Alan Menken’s Academy Award®-winning score, songs by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman (including the Academy Award®-winning title song and the show-stopping “Be Our Guest”), plus songs written especially for the stage by Alan Menken and Tim Rice (including “If I Can’t Love Her” and “A Change In Me”).
The production features a book by Linda Woolverton, author of the original screenplay. Stanley A. Meyer designed the sets, Ann Hould-Ward (Tony Award® winner for Beauty and the Beast) designed the costumes, and Natasha Katz designed the lighting.
Based on the 1991 Academy Award®-winning animated feature film, Beauty and the Beast premiered on Broadway in 1994 and still ranks as one of the longest-running shows in the industry’s history. Nominated for nine Tony® Awards, winning for Best Costume Design, Beauty remains one of the highest-grossing Broadway shows of all time.
The title’s visibility and success have expanded globally with productions of the stage show and the smash Oscar®-nominated 2017 live-action film, which grossed over $1B worldwide.
Gardner crosses the country with his wife Emily, who’s in the same cast, along with their young son and the family dog — a household assembled out of hotel rooms, load-in calls, and whatever city the tour happens to be standing in that week. Home, for the Gardners, isn’t a place. It’s something they carry and rebuild nightly, which is what Lumière does for every audience that files in.
“Being able to travel with a family and make memories is amazing. We went to the Grand Canyon, we went to Muir Woods, saw the redwoods,” said Gardner on mixing business with pleasure and traveling with his wife Emily and baby boy Jack.
Photo provided by Danny Gardner of wife Emily, son Jack (18-month-old) and dog Maple during a stop at the Grand Canyon on their leisurely drive along their Broadway tou
“Emily’s parents have come out, and my mom’s going to come out when we’re in Costa Mesa,” he said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Gardner.
Back on stage, hospitality is the whole job. Lumière’s entire reason for being is to make a stranger feel welcome the moment they walk in, and that turns out to be something Gardner has been doing off-stage, too.
Long before he strapped on the flaming candlesticks and started welcoming sold-out houses to dinner eight times a week, he was the kid who wore down an old-fashioned cassette tape (now that’s a while back) with the “Be Our Guest” song on it long before any stage thought to ask him for it.
Gardner hardly discovered Lumière. He’d been rehearsing the part, unknowingly, most of his life.
“I’ve loved that song since childhood,” he said of the showstopping song “Be Our Guest.” “As a kid, I wore it out,” he remembers, singing the song at the top of his lungs, hoping somehow, someday a producer might hear him.
Obviously, it worked, and every night on the Segerstrom stage, Gardner will bring the house down with the number. Singing that song, he said, has always been a special part of his life.
“I get a feeling from the bottom of my toes,” he said, reflecting on how perfect the song and Broadway role is to him. So, when Gardner throws his arms wide and sings “Be Our Guest,” it doesn’t play as a showstopper doing its job, it plays as a man who means it.
Gardner is also known as a tap dance man. Like cassettes, most people think tap dancing is long out of favor. Yet, how does that play into the role of Lumière? By audience reaction, most apparently say quite well.
The song-and-dance man was supposed to be a vanishing act. Tap, charm, the full-body workout turns out to be a unique Broadway skillset that, ironically, people keep insisting doesn’t quite exist anymore.
Yet, there he is, Danny Gardner, who rose through the ranks in that unique tradition, singing his heart out, using candlesticks for hands and in the role of Lumière, carrying on with timekeeping precision a technique supposedly long out of date.
“I was always the kid, a middle child, who would come home from school with so much energy that I was bouncing off the walls. I started training when I was five years old. I did acrobatics at first, for one semester,” he said.
“Then, the owner of the school said, ‘we have an all-boys tap class. ‘ I started that and liked it,” said Gardner, “so I stayed with it. From there, I evolved into other dance forms like jazz and ballet.”
Gardner enrolled in Ithaca College as a musical theatre major, got a part in the production “Mame,” and thought, “ooh, this is fun.”
“I just fell in love with it, especially dancing to the “golden age of American music.” Then came Disney and dozens of other roles, and here we are.
In fact, Gardner said that instead of prohibiting the tap, production designers have adapted “Beauty and the Beast” for all the new dances, and they worked tap dancing into “Be Our Guest.”
Imagine that…a candelabra-laden actor with a voice for days, in a Broadway role that lets him tap dance and sing a showstopping number he’s practiced for most of his life. Does it get any better? Gardner thinks not.
Picture Gardner and family on stage, bringing sold-out crowds to a standstill every night on the Segerstrom stage from September 22 until Oct. 11.
He’s the keeper of the tap-dancing flame on stage, and lights it up, literally with his hands and his voice, on the brightest Broadway stage. Then, it’s back into the car with Emily, little 18-month-old Jack in the back seat and dog Maple sticking his head out of the window, and off they go, on to yet another adventure.
For Gardner, it’s more than just a day’s work. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Gardner in “Beauty and the Beast” opens Sept. 22 and runs until Oct. 11 in Costa Mesa at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
SCFTA tickets are available at 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, Box Office open Monday (10 a.m. – 2 p.m.) and Tuesday– Friday (12 p.m. – 5 p.m.) by phone Mon-Fri., 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (714) 556-2787.